Sen. Tom Coburn doesn't understand; grants for game projects are far from wasteful.

In any sufficiently sized government, it's going to be pretty easy to cherry-pick examples of programs that seem wasteful or unnecessary. So it's not too surprising that Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) is able to do just that each year with his headline-grabbing "Waste Book," listing 100 examples of extraneous spending in the US government.

It's hard not to laugh at some of the more ridiculous-sounding entries on this year's list [PDF], from a "sidewalk to nowhere" to free bus rides for Super Bowl attendees. But when the Waste Book deals with federal grants for a number of video game-related projects, it seems to write them off without considering the important scientific and artistic goals the projects achieve. While Coburn appears to believe it's self-evident that anything related to games couldn't possibly be worthy of federal funding, talking to the people behind these projects shows taxpayer dollars are going to much more than mindless entertainment.

Take the Waste Book's description of Prom Week, a research project out of the University of California Santa Cruz that tries to model the complex social interactions among kids in a high school leading up to the big dance. A caption for a screenshot in the Waste Book notes derisively that the game "probably won't be nominated for a Nobel Prize," and another says that "taxpayers of all ages can relive prom night every day" (implying much more risque content than the game actually contains). But aside from these jabs, there's no substantive argument as to why such a project doesn't deserve its $516,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

We suppose it's supposed to be apparent that spending money on a game about high school students is an obvious waste. But there's important science behind the light concept. "In the case of Prom Week, we're figuring out how to build computational models of social interaction, allowing players to explore the social consequences of their actions," said Dr. Michael Mateas, director of the Center for Games and Playable Media and UC Santa Cruz. "Once you've developed a new capability like this, it can be used for all kinds of purposes, including education and training."

It might not look like it, but there are important computer science ideas behind the gameplay in Prom Week.

It's the training aspects that might be of most interest to those who, like Coburn, apparently don't think the public is getting its money's worth out of the Prom Week grant. Mateas says Prom Week's social modeling technology has since been adapted for use in a scenario-based simulation used to help soldiers and police "cope in unfamiliar cultural contexts and [help] them to get their jobs done in a way that minimizes escalation and loss of life." Another project is using the Prom Week technology to help prevent bullying among middle school children.

Prom Week isn't the only project to hide substantial public good behind seemingly trivial gaming applications. Take the University of Utah's NSF-funded effort to create a controller that provides accurate tactile feedback using thumbsticks that gently stretch the skin in a specific direction. The Waste Book points out that the controller can be used to simulate the recoil from a virtual gun, or give early warning that players are about to be tackled in a football game. But project creator Dr. William Provancher tells Ars that the same underlying technology is being applied to things like in-car navigation cues that don't require looking at a screen and mobile phone controls for the visually impaired.

There are also potential military applications. "Turns out that some folks in the military have expressed interest in my lab's game controller for providing an improved human interface for soldiers to control mobile robots and UAVs," Provancher said. "Since today's soldiers are of the 'gaming' generation, game controllers are sometimes a preferred human interface for soldiers to interact with."

Provancher also noted that the $1.5 million that the Waste Book cites as paying for the controller actually went toward the underlying fundamental research into perception and cognition behind the project. The actual controller prototype was developed by students using University of Utah funds, at no cost to the federal government.

"The reality is that very little 'government' money has gone to the development of my lab's game controller," Provancher said. "So, while I'm not particularly happy about being included in the senator's report, it's pretty clear to me that whoever compiled the report for the senator doesn't really understand what my NSF grants are supporting and has not focused on the breadth of research supported and the resulting benefits to society of this research. But clearly if one sets forth to focus on 'the negative,' one can always find what they are looking for."

Funding Games as Art

Enlarge/ Is Walden, A Game art? Yes. Is it worth federal funding? Hmmm...

Games aren't just useful as scientific simulations, of course. They're also works of expression that just recently got full First Amendment protection in a landmark Supreme Court ruling. The National Endowment for the Arts has come around to the same line of thinking, providing grants to a number of game-related projects noted as wasteful by Coburn.

Of course, it's harder to objectively justify federal funding for this kind of artistic patronage, and it could easily be argued that the government should get out of the art-funding business entirely. That seems to be the Waste Book's thinking when it suggests that a $50,000 for the Games for Change festival—which focuses on games that have a direct social impact—was a "laudable" effort that "would have been better spent providing direct help to the poor, such as antiretroviral drugs for many HIV patients on waiting lists for drugs from the Ryan White program."

That seems like a pretty high standard of comparison for such a small grant—one that a wide variety of important government programs might fail. But that doesn't mean the Games for Change grant failed to reflect the growing importance of socially relevant games or of a festival that has grown from under 100 attendees in 2004 to over 800 attendees this year. "The [NEA] support underscores that games are a form of media spanning a diverse range of interests and disciplines, from the artistic to the cultural to the educational," Michelle Byrd, co-president of Games for Change, told Ars. "NEA support of games, and events such as ours, assists in bringing validation to the form as a whole, in particular the appreciation of games as an art form."

"Play is by no means a frivolous subject of study," added Chris Bensch, vice president of collections and chief curator at Rochester's Strong Museum of Play. The museum received a $150,000 grant to put together an exhibit chronicling three decades of American games (including video games). "Not only is play essential to human growth and development, but what we play, how we play, and the things we play with tell an important story about our nation’s changing history and culture."

Some may argue that games are much more frivolous and disposable than the other, more "serious" arts that the NEA usually funds. But those arguments fall apart quickly when looking at Walden, A Game, a USC project that transforms Thoreau's classic meditation on nature and solitude into an interactive space for quiet reflection.

"The game has value to anyone interested in understanding the life and writings of this iconic American author," says team leader Tracy Fullerton. "Hopefully, players will be inspired by his ideas about natural science, philosophy, and the importance of living a balanced life; perhaps it will lead them to read the original book, or perhaps to look at how they live their own lives."

"Receiving a grant from the NEA has made the development team very proud. This project has been a labor of love for several years, and we are grateful for the recognition of the NEA that the video game form is one that is now coming into its own as an art form."

Video games are great. Many are artistic. Many are functional. They are undoubtedly changing the way that future generations behave in social situations. They improve logic and deductive reasoning in capacities we haven't seen before. That doesn't mean the government needs to be in the business of spending tax dollars on that section.

The federal government, in my little-L-libertarian opinion, is designed to handle the functions that the private sector cannot, either through practical necessity as a function of social or economic governance or an inability for the private sector to self-regulate because of market imbalances. The video game industry is 1) not a function of social/economic governance, and 2) quite capable of self-regulation.

The practical benefits that these government projects have created, are they well worth the cost? More importantly, are they acting at least as efficiently as the private sector at providing improvement? How does America's Army stack up to Call of Duty or Medal of Honor in terms of integrating military and video games? If the government is developing game controllers for unmanned recon operations, why do so many remote vehicles use an X-Box controller instead?

Sure, we care about video games. A lot of people care about Sesame Street and PBS. Others care about public accessibility to healthcare. But the only way to balance the budget is to spend less money, period. That means people have to make sacrifices about government funding regarding the things that they care about. And video games, like Sesame Street and healthcare and numerous other "important" issues, aren't going to disappear just because the federal government isn't funding them. Some may stagnate, and others may be worse hit than others, but I just can't buy that video games deserve immunity from federal budget cuts because of their paramount importance to American federalism.

122 posts | registered May 27, 2010

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl